Tag: Animals
This has had 10,000+ YouTube hits, so maybe you’ve seen it before but it’s here because this particular dog has clearly read my earlier post, Beating Yourself Up for Fun & Profit, and is no doubt channeling his inner Donald O’Connor, Michael Richards, and Rowan Atkinson. And why not? Fighting yourself has to be one of the quintessential slapstick gags: it’s physically difficult, it’s mime, it’s absurdist humor…. it’s barf-irrific.
“Contrasto! Constrasto!” Carlo Mazzone-Clementi used to holler. Comedy teams have traditionally relied on contrasting characters, the stronger the contrast the better. Laurel is skinny, Hardy is pleasingly plump. Keaton had Joe Roberts, Chaplin had Eric Campbell. Harpo Marx is said to have stopped talking to differentiate himself from his yackety-yak brothers. The Odd Couple’s Oscar Madison was a slob, Felix Unger a neat freak. Contrast gives you something to play off of, but you still have to have a good act! With great serendipity, I recently stumbled upon these three entertaining examples.
It’s not just you humans who perform physical comedy; your fellow mammals can do it too. One of the best examples is Gaylord Maynard’s drunken horse act, which I still remember laughing hard at when I was lucky enough to see this cross-breed duo perform in the Hanneford Circus in White Plains, NY in 1980.
The hardest act I ever had to follow, bar none, was the boxing kangaroo on the Hubert Castle Circus. Here’s Woody Allen battling a kangaroo when he was playing ringmaster at the Hippodrome in 1966.
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin